Photo: Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE/Getty Images
The Boston Celtics are better than the New York Knicks. This isn’t particularly debatable, right? Boston won ten more games during a regular season they admittedly mostly sleepwalked through. They’re the defending champs. The Knicks feared Boston’s stacked roster so much that they constructed themselves specifically in their image — just a little worse. There is not a single basketball observer who could look at these two teams and make any sort of serious argument that the Celtics aren’t superior.
And yet, here we are.
Over two nights in Boston, the Knicks have torn out the heart of the Celtics, turning a team that was widely assumed indestructible into a fragile, perilous house of cards. It is one thing to fall behind 20 points in the third quarter and come back and win; it is another to do it twice. The Knicks have made their wild mad dashes in the fourth quarter by being tougher and more relentless than the Celtics, but they have also required all sorts of luck: The Celtics are a great shooting team that has turned into bricklayers in this series, shooting 25-for-100 from the three-point line. That they have shot 100 three-pointers — a ridiculous, almost surreally high number — speaks to the Celtics’ strength and their big flaw. When the shots are falling (as they usually are), the Celtics can overwhelm you, but when the shots are not falling, they look like they have no idea what they’re doing. Late in games, the Celtics, as pointed out by No Dunks podcast host Trey Kerby, look like a pickup team playing to 11 but stuck at nine; they just keep chucking up wild threes in hopes of finishing the game. More than anything else, the Celtics seem rattled: They look like they know they are better but that they’re going to lose anyway.
And if they’re this unnerved now, just wait until game three at Madison Square Garden on Saturday afternoon. MSG can feel riotous during a random Tuesday game in February against the Hornets; it is going to be a centrifuge of madness on Saturday. The cheapest tickets for Saturday are exorbitantly expensive; I’m not sure I remember a more anticipated Knicks game.
There is nothing quite more exciting than when your team pulls off an improbable comeback and in the process becomes a furious, kinetic best version of itself. Jalen Brunson is hitting big shots, Karl-Anthony Towns is getting big rebounds, Mikal Bridges (who is, at last, justifying all the Knicks traded for him) is making big stops, Josh Hart is just big in the face of whoever is standing opposite him … and it’s all happening so fast. During the first three quarters of their games against the Celtics, the Knicks have looked outmatched, as expected. (“You’d rather not fall behind 20, no,” Brunson said after Thursday’s win.) And then, in the fourth quarter, they have been the platonic ideal of Knicks basketball: relentless and unstoppable. They’ve been the Knicks we have all been waiting to show up — for decades now.
The Knicks return to the MSG Thunderdome Saturday afternoon with the opportunity to take a seemingly (though not entirely!) impenetrable 3-0 lead over the Celtics. A win in this series justifies everything the Knicks have done in the Leon Rose era: Trading for KAT and Bridges, keeping Tom Thibodeau, distracting Jim Dolan with the Sphere. A win over the Celtics would make them a serious contender for the NBA title in a way they haven’t been in 30 years. It would be the biggest story in sports. It would seem impossible. And yet: Here we are.
